Preventing a Sandy Hook in Gaston County

Todd Dellinger, principal at Brookside Elementary School works with Yolanda Glenn, a third-grade teacher at Brookside, during a training session on unarming an intruder.

Mike Hensdill

By By Amanda Memrick

Published: Saturday, April 6, 2013 at 11:38 PM.

Two teachers grabbed 25 simulated students and moved them to a corner away from the door, following Gaston County Schools procedure for a lockdown.

An intruder burst in the door. He fired rubber bullets at the “children” huddled in the corner. The demonstration used air-filled trash bags to represent kids.

Seven seconds passed from the time the intruder started shooting until he left the classroom.

“There were 25 kids in this class. Twenty didn’t make it,” said Gaston County parent and self-defense expert Ryan Hoover. “Seven seconds. He got 20 out of 25 and some took multiple rounds.”

Teachers ran the drill again, this time doing what their instincts told them would keep their classroom safe. They barricaded the door with tables and chairs and hid students behind chairs throughout the room, not corralling them into a corner. That time, shots hit five of the simulated students.

The third time around, the bags were again tucked behind chairs scattered throughout the room, but when the intruder entered, a few members of Hoover’s self-defense team threw boxing gloves at the intruder. The gunman couldn’t fire a shot that hit a single simulated student.

“Does everybody get the idea?” Hoover asked during the training session. “If we follow what we know current procedure to be, once he reaches that door, once he comes through that door, it’s fish in a barrel. I just think we can do better.”

Two teachers grabbed 25 simulated students and moved them to a corner away from the door, following Gaston County Schools procedure for a lockdown.

An intruder burst in the door. He fired rubber bullets at the “children” huddled in the corner. The demonstration used air-filled trash bags to represent kids.

Seven seconds passed from the time the intruder started shooting until he left the classroom.

“There were 25 kids in this class. Twenty didn’t make it,” said Gaston County parent and self-defense expert Ryan Hoover. “Seven seconds. He got 20 out of 25 and some took multiple rounds.”

Teachers ran the drill again, this time doing what their instincts told them would keep their classroom safe. They barricaded the door with tables and chairs and hid students behind chairs throughout the room, not corralling them into a corner. That time, shots hit five of the simulated students.

The third time around, the bags were again tucked behind chairs scattered throughout the room, but when the intruder entered, a few members of Hoover’s self-defense team threw boxing gloves at the intruder. The gunman couldn’t fire a shot that hit a single simulated student.

“Does everybody get the idea?” Hoover asked during the training session. “If we follow what we know current procedure to be, once he reaches that door, once he comes through that door, it’s fish in a barrel. I just think we can do better.”

Response to Sandy Hook

After an armed man shot his way into Sandy Hook Elementary Dec. 14, 2012, Gaston County Schools issued a statement about the tragedy and reassured the community the school system had safety measures in place.

In the weeks that followed, the school system formed a school security task force to look at the district’s safety measures in four areas: school employees, facilities, training and procedures and mental health. The task force included five central office staff, three principals, three teachers, three members of the Gaston County Police, two people from the Department of Social Services, one Gaston County Health Department representative and four parents.

They presented nearly $10.6 million worth of recommendations, not including the cost to add a school resource officer to every school. That could exceed $1 million. They also provided a list of things with little to no cost to put into place immediately.

The crisis manual is reviewed each year and the school district will make any changes necessary, Reidy said.

The work of the school system and law enforcement is the reason that Gaston County Schools has a better safety record than other districts of similar size, Reidy said.

“And this is an ongoing process. We continue to look at our safety. We continue to look at what safety officials say the best practices are,” Reidy said. “What we’re doing today, tomorrow we’re looking at it again.”

Parent: Get away first

Hoover has a 10-year-old son at a Gaston County elementary school.

“If there really is somebody in the building trying to hurt people and you can get out, get out,” Hoover said he’s told his son. “And I shouldn’t have to have that conversation with him about procedures that are at a public school.”

Current policies try to force standards on kids that no adult would follow, he said.

Hoover believes the task force didn’t think outside of the box.

“There’s nothing wrong with what’s being recommended. I think at some level it’ll make people feel a lot better, but I don’t think they addressed what the real weaknesses in the security are. There’s little to nothing about the current procedures being overhauled,” Hoover said. “If they’re not recognizing weaknesses now, what’s going to make them recognize them in a year?”

A locked door didn’t stop the armed intruder at Sandy Hook Elementary. Neither did the security system that required visitors to ring the doorbell and show a picture ID to office staff before gaining entry.

Hoover supports the idea of a school resource officer at every elementary school.

“However, you have at any given school 50, 60, 70 staff members that are going to be your actual first responders, and if you’re not training them properly and you’re not giving them sound, practical procedures, you’re not doing enough.”

Teachers are trained on how to deal with fires, tornadoes and radiation. He thinks that training should extend to dealing with an intruder.

Hoover’s Safer Campus Now approach focuses on getting away first. If a person can’t get away, that person should try to hide. If there’s no other choice, a person goes toward the threat and attempts to disarm the intruder.

“People don’t want to talk about training teachers to take down a gunman,” Hoover said. “People don’t want to talk about training kids to throw things at a gunman. Regardless, people have this mentality that this happens somewhere else.”

Fences, cameras and security systems give the impression of safety.

“I think people truly believe that it’s as simple as ‘Let’s throw up some fencing and add some buzzers and that will be that,’” Hoover said. “If you bring in help from the outside, then you’re somehow admitting that you don’t know how to fix the problem. And bottom line, you don’t want to have to admit that there are problems to begin with.”

Teacher talks back

One high school teacher thinks the current procedures for dealing with an intruder or a lockdown need to change.

“With the current lockdown policy that we have, procedures say simply lock your doors. Line your kids up along the wall,” said the educator, who asked that her name not be used for fear of retribution over criticizing the school system.

“The kids are just basically lined up for slaughter. If they have a gun they can go down the row of children and shoot each one.”

At her school, a teacher needs a key to lock the classroom door, which locks from the outside. A lockdown policy instructs teachers to slide colored cards under the door to indicate whether things are OK in their classrooms or they needed help. That just tells a gunman there’s a class full of people, she said.

The plan for an intruder in the building calls for teachers to bring their students back inside if a class is outside, but she said bringing students inside isn’t an option because outside doors are supposed to be locked during the school day and especially during a lockdown.

“Secondly, I don’t know why anyone would want to bring the children back in,” she said. “Me personally, I would just break procedure and tell them to take off.”

The majority of teachers probably haven’t even looked at the crisis plans in place, she said.

“You’re supposed to read it, but nobody actually does,” the teacher said. “And I was guilty of not reading it. I just did what the veteran teachers did when I started teaching.”

She thinks the school system needs to reform its policies, but it also needs to allow each school to do its own assessment, creating an individual security plan.

Intercoms and panic buttons are good ideas, the teacher said. She agreed with security upgrades, but said that’s the bare minimum of what’s necessary.

“I think what would be practical and what would be more cost effective is if we have more training, just knowing that there are other options,” the teacher said. “We’re not going to speak up because we’re under so much fire already. The fact that you haven’t heard teachers say a word, it’s not that we don’t think something needs to happen; it’s that we’re afraid to speak up.”

You can reach reporter Amanda Memrick at 704-869-1839 or follow @AmandaMemrick on Twitter.